| On Monday, five of the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees cleared the way for the construction of Donald Trump’s White House ballroom. The ruling came after nearly a year’s worth of litigation in the courts below, which issued carefully considered opinions and orders ruling against the administration. But the Trump administration rushed to the Supreme Court with an emergency application to stay those rulings, and after about two weeks of consideration by the Court, Trump once again got what he wanted. |
| The ruling comes despite the fact that Trump’s construction project is probably illegal under federal law, despite the fact that even Republicans in Congress wouldn’t authorize it when they had the chance, and despite the fact that the Trump administration’s key argument before the Court — that the ballroom was no longer merely a ballroom, but instead an “integrated military complex” that had to be built for security reasons and that just happened to have a ballroom on top of it — appeared to be a flimsy pretext cooked up at the last minute. |
| The majority included all of the conservative justices except Chief Justice John Roberts, and their reasoning boils down to just two points. Neither is persuasive. |
| The first argument is that the plaintiff, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, likely lacked standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place because the alleged harm to the organization was based merely on “offense, disagreement, or distaste” with the project. Never mind that Congress created the National Trust over 75 years ago “to facilitate public participation in the preservation of sites, buildings, and objects of national significance or interest,” or that there is a line of Supreme Court cases that allows environmental groups to sue on theories like this when “the interests at stake are germane to the organization’s purpose.” |
| The conservative majority’s principal response to this is that the Court “has not found standing in circumstances like these before.” That is true but trivial as a legal or logical matter, since no two cases are exactly alike. |
| The majority’s second key claim is that the Trump administration would have suffered irreparable harm in the absence of a stay of the lower court rulings, based on declarations from senior administration officials who “attest[ed] to national security and other harms that would likely arise from enjoining a ‘single, coherent’ project that cannot be readily cleaved into distinct below- and above-ground pieces.” |
| The argument is galling for several reasons. |
| To start, the administration did not take this position in the courts below. In fact, the DOJ said as recently as January that the construction below ground was “driven by national security concerns independent” of the ballroom. This should have been enough to dispense with the administration’s claim — offered for the first time just weeks ago — that the ballroom was part of a single, indivisible construction project that was critical for national security purposes to ensure the safety of the president, his staff, and visiting foreign dignitaries. |
| The declarations that the majority relied upon were also not credible, a point inadvertently underscored by the fact that the justices evidently could not bring themselves to name the relevant officials but instead described them by their titles — “the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Director of the United States Secret Service, and the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Secretary of the Army.” |
| Who are these mysterious people? |
| The Director of National Intelligence is Jay Clayton, who started the job just weeks ago and has no national security experience or expertise. |
| The Director of the CIA is John Ratcliffe, a Republican politician who got the job after attracting Trump’s attention by attacking Robert Mueller during the Trump-Russia investigation. |
| The head of the FBI is Kash Patel, an incompetent and unqualified Trump lackey. |
| The Secretary of Homeland Security is Markwayne Mullin, who also got the job several months ago despite having no relevant experience or expertise. |
| As for the Secretary of the Army, shortly after the opinion came out, news broke that he is resigning due to reported conflicts with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. |
| And of course, the Secretary of State is Marco Rubio. This is the same person who told the courts during the litigation over Trump’s “emergency” tariffs last year that they had to rule in Trump’s favor because of the “significant and irreparable harm to the foreign policy and national security of the United States” and “the grave harm that would result,” including “severe consequences for ongoing peace negotiations and human rights abuses.” No one took this seriously at the time, and none of his predictions came true. |
| The majority’s willingness to indulge the national security claims — or pretexts — offered by the administration is unfortunate but not entirely surprising. |
| In June, the Republican appointees on the Court allowed the Trump administration to immediately terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, despite a long and ugly record of racist attacks on Haitians by Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and their allies. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the claims were not “overtly racial” and “in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications” — an interesting way to describe a campaign of lies about Haitians eating pets or coming to the country with AIDS. |
| These decisions have consequences. On Monday, a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant in Springfield, Ohio, appears to have committed suicide after losing protected status and being forced to wear an ankle monitor. |
| The ballroom case does not pose these sorts of fatal risks, but there is a broader and more pernicious legal problem at play here, which is that conservative lawyers and conservative judges are now practically insisting that the courts must take the Trump administration’s claims in court at face value — whatever they are, and without even bothering to question them. This is true even if the available evidence contradicts the Trump administration’s claims; even if, as in the TPS case, the administration’s real motivations can be readily inferred from the public record; and even if, as in the ballroom case, there has been no opportunity for the other side to test the administration’s claims in discovery. |
| The majority concludes by stating that it is not ruling on “the legality of the government’s East Wing project,” but as a practical matter, it has rubber-stamped the project. The administration will now keep barreling forward on construction while doing everything that it can to slow down or halt the court proceedings entirely. Maybe someone can find a new plaintiff and file a new lawsuit, but if (or when) the National Trust’s case eventually comes back to the Court, the majority appears ready to issue a final ruling dismissing the challenge on the merits for lack of standing. |
| The Court’s ruling may also embolden the administration to move forward with renaming the Kennedy Center or tearing it down entirely, since the Supreme Court has now rewarded the administration for moving quickly without any authorization from Congress, the courts, or — as even the majority appears close to conceding in the ballroom case — the applicable federal law. |
| The long-term political implications, however, could prove different. |
| The Supreme Court is historically unpopular. The most recent dip in the Court’s approval rating appears to have come from Republicans who want the Court to do even more of what Trump wants, but setting that aside, that rating has hovered around 40% for five years now. |
| The momentum for Supreme Court reform within the Democratic Party has been growing for years, and the ballroom case provides a simple and politically potent line of attack against the Court’s conservative majority. Americans disapprove of the project by a 2-1 margin, but it’s coming now whether they like it or not, and it will, as a practical matter, become the most visible symbol of the extraordinary deference that the Court’s Republican appointees have shown to Trump. |
| None of it should be surprising at this point — the same conservative majority created a previously nonexistent doctrine of presidential criminal immunity that paved the way for Trump’s reelection in 2024 — but they continue to find new ways to provide ammunition for their harshest critics. |
| Early last year, as the administration was just ramping up on various fronts, there was a debate among some legal scholars and observers about whether the country had entered a “constitutional crisis.” There was a doctrinal problem with this argument — the phrase “constitutional crisis” typically refers to a conflict among the three branches of the federal government that cannot be resolved through normal political or legal channels — but it captured the feeling among many people that the administration was moving quickly, aggressively, and lawlessly. |
| In fact, we didn’t have a constitutional crisis then, and we don’t have one now. |
| What we have is unified Republican control of the federal government — a Republican president who does whatever he wants, no matter how ill-conceived or deadly the consequences; a Republican majority in Congress that has largely abdicated its constitutional role in deference to Trump and his agendas, both political and personal; and a Supreme Court controlled by Republican appointees who appear willing to take virtually anything that the administration says at face value. |
